medium and long term trends?

[David Relson]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004 14:18:44 -0500
Greg Louis <glouis at dynamicro.on.ca> wrote:

> On 20040103 (Sat) at 0222:59 +0800, Bopolissimus Platypus wrote:

...[snip]...

> > 3.  does bogofilter  currently decode base64, MIME, uuencode,
> >      zip files?  on the mailing list, long ago, i noted resistance
> >      to
> >       decoding anything(understandable, due to  the performance
> >      hit) but clearly decoding that stuff has got to work better
> >      than just classifying on the MIME  headers.  although of 
> >     course there are still ways to spoof.
> 
> It doesn't decode such stuff, other than MIME headers, though it's
> been considered.  I suspect the improvement is small enough that the
> only people who might need it are the high-volume users.  For them,
> one false positive in ten thousand and one false negative in two
> hundred are unacceptably many, and it's worthwhile to invest in the
> memory and processors to overcome the performance hit.  Me, I'd rather
> keep the speed decent even on the old P400 gateway where my personal
> mail arrives (though with the recent explosion of spam volume, one
> false negative in two hundred spam is beginning to be a lot for me
> too! :(

Minor correction, bogofilter _does_ understand MIME and will decode
base64, quoted-printable, and uuencoded MIME parts, if they're
text/plain or text/html.  MIME parts that are applications, images, etc
are ignored.  With this decoding, it works fine on my P133 mail server
(which is admittedly low volume).

David